This is a blog about my experiences with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, tips and tricks as well as news from the CRM community.

Monday, July 18, 2011

Plugin Registration Rules in CRM 2011

I wrote this post a while back but never published it! With the introduction of Sandbox in CRM 2011, plugins can be registered in CRM Online in isolation, which introduces a whole new set of validation and rules for registering plugins. I have created the following decision graph which can be helpful in understanding the plugin registration process and limitations on the CRM server:

Additionally, there are these general rules that apply to all plugins:

Plugin assemblies must have a strong name (either fully signed or delay signed).

The strong name of a plugin assembly (and its types) excluding the version build and revision numbers must be unique in the CRM organization.

Workflow custom activities are not supported in sandbox mode (isolation).

This means whether the Fully Qualified Name of the plugin is trusted. There is a table in MSCRM_CONFIG called PluginPublishers. You can assign trust levels to specific plugins here. If your trust level is 1 (trusted) then you can register this plugin outside of sandbox without having to be a deployment manager. By default only Microsoft plugins are trusted (e.g. ActivityFeeds plugins anybody can register). However, I don't think there is a supported way to add your custom plugins to this table.

About me

I used to be part of the CRM product team at Microsoft and I recently joined the Avanade Canada team as a consultant in the CRM Service Line, I developed a sort of delight in seeing how Dynamics CRM is evolving as a platform (xRM) and how its feature set has matured to be able to model and address plenty of business scenarios beyond Customer Relationship Management. I was recently given the Microsoft MVP award in Dynamics CRM and I am really excited to be part of the program and continue contributing to the CRM community.